After Austerlitz, he rushed to the other extreme and forced the Hapsburgs to a hostility in which the Marie Louise marriage was only a forced and uneasy truce.  His motives are not, in my judgment, to be assigned to mere lust of domination, but rather to a reasoned though exaggerated conviction of the need of Prussia and Russia to his Continental System.  Above all things, he now sought to humble England, so that finally he might be free for his long-deferred Oriental enterprise.  This is the irony of his career, that, though he preferred the career of Alexander the Great to that of Caesar; though he placed his victory at Austerlitz far below the triumph of the great Macedonian at Issus which assured the conquest of the Orient, yet he felt himself driven to the very measures which tethered him to cette vieille Europe and which finally roused the Continent against him.

Among his errors of judgment, assuredly his behaviour to Austria in 1805 was not the least.  The recent history of Europe supplies a suggestive contrast.  Two generations after Austerlitz, the Hapsburg Power was shattered by the disaster of Koeniggraetz, and once more lost all influence in Germany and Italy.  But the victor then showed consideration for the vanquished.  Bismarck had pondered over the lessons of history, because, as he said, history teaches one how far one may safely go.  He therefore persuaded King William to forego claims that would have embittered the rivalry of Prussia and Austria.  Nay! he recurred to Talleyrand’s policy of encouraging the Hapsburgs to seek in the Balkan Peninsula compensation for their losses in the west:  and within fifteen years the basis of the Triple Alliance was firmly laid.  Napoleon, on the other hand, for lack of that statesmanlike moderation which consecrates victory and cements the fabric of an enduring Empire, soon saw the political results of Austerlitz swept away by the rising tide of the nations’ wrath.  In less than nine years the Austrians and their allies were masters of Paris.

NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION.—­The account given on p. 41 of the drowning of numbers of Russians at the close of the Battle of Austerlitz was founded upon the testimony of Napoleon and many French generals; the facts, as related by Lejeune, seemed quite convincing; the Czar Alexander also asserted at Vienna in 1815 that 20,000 Russians had been drowned there.  But the local evidence (kindly furnished to me by Professor Fournier of Vienna) seems to prove that the story is a myth.  Both lakes were drained only a few days after the battle, at Napoleon’s orders; in the lower lake not a single corpse was found; in the upper lake 150 corpses of horses, but only two, some say three, of men, were found.  Probably Napoleon invented the catastrophe for the sake of dramatic effect, and others followed the lead given in his bulletin.  The Czar may have adopted the story because it helped to excuse his defeat. (See my article in the “Eng.  Hist.  Rev.” for July, 1902.)

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